Spring 2012 Graduate Courses

The Teaching Apprenticeship will introduce graduate students who are teaching classes in the department to the professional expectations they will encounter as they seek careers in the foreign language teaching profession. Two major topics will be addressed: practical advice f or your own classes, and an introduction to the most current methodologies of foreign language teaching in New Jersey and in the United States. Both issues will help to prepare you for your future as a foreign language educator. The practical aspects of this class will include the writing of lesson plans and thematic units for a learner-centered classroom, based on the Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century and the ACTFL proficiency guidelines, as well as the use of authentic teaching materials for meaningful activities and assessments. Assignments for this class will also include a weekly journal and an end-of-semester report, two peer observations per semester, and weekly observations regarding the classes you teach. This class is taught in German.

The classical courtly romances, Hartmann von Aue’s Erec and Íwein, Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and Isolde, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, will be situated within the European literary, political and social context. Each author, Wolfram humorously, if defiantly, acknowledges a deep or abiding influence of French literature. Nevertheless, their visions of courtly life are also so highly individualistic that they are often at variance with each other.

Emphasis will be on oppositional or idiosyncratic visions of the courtly world and on the structural and stylistic shaping of the narrative as dictated, or influenced, by an idealistic and critical view of life in the realm of King Arthur and by the authors’ training. A correlative area will be literary criticism, explicit and implicit, within Gottfried’s and Wolfram’s opera. This will include the reception of French literary models and of courtly topoi, the adaptation of typological thought prominent in learned and ecclesiastical circles, as well as critical evaluations of the works and their influence, in part or in toto, by their predecessors and contemporaries.

An in-depth study of the literature and theory of German Romanticism. In particular, we will analyze the structure and function of gender in Romantic poetics, and trace important filiations to contemporary gender theory. Works by Friedrich Schlegel, Dorothea Veit Schlegel, Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Tieck, Eichendorff, and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Readings available in English translation; discussion in English.

Focusing primarily on Walter Benjamin’s great unfinished opus, The Arcades Project [Das Passagen-Werk], the course will examine citation as a compositional principle. While studying citation as an art of montage, we will ask why such a fragmentary, discontinuous mode of construction seemed to Benjamin to be the most appropriate way to address the subject of the Paris arcades. Considered by him to be the most important architectural form of the 19th C, the arcades served as a focal point for his thinking about modern life. In The Arcades Project he brought together material on technological innovation, fashion, urban planning, the flâneur, prostitution and gambling, Marxist theories of phantasmagoria and commodity fetishism, Baudelaire and the streets of Paris, boredom, the press and the tempo of modern life, urban dreams and utopian socialism.

Examining Benjamin’s efforts to think through these various issues, the way each might be read as a passage into and through the others, the course will focus on questions of framing, citing, and recycling; on his theory of the dialectical image; and on what he saw as the task of the materialist historian.

In addition to The Arcades Project and other writings by Benjamin from the 1930s, we will examine short texts on architectural history; literary and journalistic work by Kraus, Aragon, Poe, and Baudelaire; and critical texts on the poetics of citation by Perloff, Sieburt, Lindner, Compagnon, and others. Readings available in German, French and English. Discussion in English